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bs0d3 writes "Bradley Manning has finally been scheduled for a day in court. On December 16, he will have an Article 32 hearing (military pre-trial). Private Manning has been in jail for one and half years. The Article 32 hearing will begin at Fort Meade, Maryland. The primary purpose of the hearing is to evaluate the relative strengths and weaknesses of the government's case, as well as to provide the defense with an opportunity to obtain pretrial discovery. Further trial dates and locations are still unknown."

Spin is when someone takes a military personel's violation of his oaths and betrayal of trust as something that should be ignored or lauded. Of course the public wants to know military secrets, that doesnt make it any less against the law, and any less deserving of a military trial.

Mod me down, but ask yourself this-- if this were 1863, and manning has spilled military secrets to the papers, do you thinkA) he would have been given a medalB) he would have languished in a cell until after the war was over, g

Neither is releasing 100K classified documents just because maybe there might be something in there that might be incriminating. If you got specific evidence of something illegal there are proper ways to handle that. Publishing hundreds of thousands of basically unrelated secrets because someone might find something not so nice in there is not a soldier's right, duty and obligation.

What specific criminal activity was he trying to expose before he released those documents? Were all 100k classified documents supporting that specific criminal activity? How much of those secrets had nothing to do with the specific criminal activity?

If you have evidence of a specific crime, the whistleblower act might protect you somewhat for only that evidence. (IANAL). However, if you just decide to release a bunch of classified documents because you are pissed off at the government and you think there might be something in there to give them a black eye, well, you're on your own.

Do you want those who improperly classified info to be punished, as well?

As that is neither a violation of oaths, nor military code, nor US law, I think the appropriate response is to determine who is at fault and hold them accountable through the normal democratic process.

As that is neither a violation of oaths, nor military code, nor US law, I think the appropriate response is to determine who is at fault and hold them accountable through the normal democratic process.

The "normal democratic process", in this case, seems to be that nobody is condemned or punished for exercising an power which exceeds constitutional authority if the other side of politics might like to use that power themselves.

While all of the options for institutional recourse haven't yet been exhausted in this case, there are plenty of recent examples where they have been exhausted and essentially nobody was held accountable. Nobody, for example, will do hard time for the torture of prisoners. My hopes aren't high.

It is if just one document demonstrates evidence of criminal malfeasance that was being ignored. Apparently there were many more documents that demonstrated criminality and collusions to hide and commit more crimes.

That the administration that purposefully hid existing and ongoing crimes was all to self evident. What is even worse is after the legitimate release of those documents and the evidence of criminal activity they disclose, virtually nothing has been done to prosecute those individuals breaking laws.

The person who released those documents is entitled to make claim that they were adhering to the principle of law and the requirements of their oath to ensure justice was pursued. No one is ever a slave to the criminality of the temporary supervisor, every individual is always bound by their own sense of justice and morality.

Also it is abundantly clear in this case that the US military did purposefully and wilfully deny Bradley Manning his rights as a citizen, did knowingly and with intent physically and mentally abuse him in order to criminally extend the case against others and made only token attempts to adhere to the law months after the arrest and detention of Bradley Manning during which time they attempted to manufacture a case. Based apparently on the unsubstantiated betrayal of "Wired Magazine" whose focus was on profits not justice and Adrian Lamo and known criminal employed by "Wired Magazine" for dubious reasons.

So was Wired Magazine involved in a for profit attempt at entrapment. Did Adrian Lamo himself actual conspire to obtain and release the records (already having a record for criminal computer hacking. Did "Wired Magazine" and Adrian Lamo conspire to shift the charges from themselves to Brian Manning. So was Wired Magazine the betrayer of the worst order or did they collude in criminal activity and then seek to shift the blame to a pasty, either way "Wired" sucks ass' let them know what you think of them http://www.wired.com/about/feedback/ [wired.com].

It's expected that if a soldier determines that his orders are illegal, he'll face a court-martial to prove it. A junior enlisted man can't just say "No, Captain, I don't want to do that," and expect "Hmm. Okay. I'll ask someone else." as a response.

I, (NAME), do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic;that I will bear true faith and allegiance to the same; and that I will obey the orders of the President of the United States and the orders of the officers appointed over me, according to regulations and the Uniform Code of Military Justice. So help me God.

Later, of course, you swear loyalty to the President, your officers, UCMJ, etc., but I suppose one could argue that since this part of the oath comes first, if there is a conflict between the former and the latter, this part would be more pertinent.

The reason the Constitution part comes first is because it is the foundation of the law. The orders you swear to obey, must be legal under the Constitution. If the order is illegal, you must NOT OBEY it.

Yes. Read. You can google it. You can even watch the video, as it was released long ago by Wikileaks. He found evidence of US soldiers murdering a crowd - on camera. He tried for very long to get anyone in the chain of command to care. They did not. He did what he thought necessary when your command is hiding murders - he leaked it. You will refuse to look, as will his prosecutors and judges. This is a travesty.

The other leaks are about torture, execution of civilians (I find the distinction between citizens and non citizens disgusting but yes, US citizens as well) without due process, involvement of the US in interference with due process and democratic processes of allies (in cases regarding mass murder and war crimes in which the US were involved), trying to rig justice, knowing (and condoning) pollution of poor countries in Africa (the kind of pollution which causes death), corruption, condoning of corruption, small things such as sexual child abuse during "peace operations" and "exporting democracy". Why did they decide to classify instead of PROSECUTE THE GUILTY?

That cable was released by WikiLeaks in May, 2011, and, as McClatchy put it at the time, "provides evidence that U.S. troops executed at least 10 Iraqi civilians, including a woman in her 70s and a 5-month-old infant, then called in an airstrike to destroy the evidence, during a controversial 2006 incident in the central Iraqi town of Ishaqi." The U.S. then lied and claimed the civilians were killed by the airstrike.

If you were interested, you could have done your own trivial amount of research.

Why couldnt someone have come out 10 posts ago and just linked to an article like that or simply said "Ishaqi incident"?

Because usually when someone on slashdot makes a big deal about there not being any credible specific information about things which are TRIVIAL to find out for oneself it means that someone has no interest in actually knowing the truth.

I mean, i googled wikileaks atrocities, and the execution mentioned above was the first fucking result. If you are really so interested in the truth... perhaps try looking for it.

How about the fact that the DEA -- supposedly a law enforcement agency -- has amassed such vast signals intelligence power that dictators are demanding DEA assistance in spying on political opponents? We knew that the war on drugs was out of control before the leak, but this gives a clear indication of just how out of control things are, and shows us why the government considers the DEA to be a member of the intelligence community. It is also a warning sign, because unlike the CIA, FBI, or NSA, the DEA is allowed to engage in both foreign and domestic operations, including intelligence gathering.

1) Manning DID NOT release the documents, as you keep asserting. He transmitted them to Wikileaks, a trusted organization that kept secret whistleblowers secret.

2) Wikileaks DID NOT RELEASE a blessed thing; the New York Times, the Guardian of London, and two other papers were given the block of documents, and they and they *alone* released what they thought safe to release after careful review, in which Wikileaks did not participate. If you have a problem, take it up with the newspapers, not Manning, not Wikileaks.

3) The full documents got out after a reporter from the Guardian, I believe, idiotically published the password in an article. Go hang him.

4) Manning and Wikileaks exercise due diligence and made sure that they released nothing harmful to the troops by giving control of the release to responsible reporters who were supposed to know what they are doing. That is precisely how responsible leakers have always done it.

5) The reporters let us see that our troops had committed a savage murder, on camera, and the chain of command had refused to investigate.

6) Large number of stories are now known to us about immoral and illegal acts committed by our government and others. One of those reports triggered the uprising called the Arab Spring. Perhaps you've heard of it.

7) The US government in the past ten years has extended secret classifications to even mundane domestic reports. We even have secret laws that we cannot see, and no-fly lists that cannot be seen or contested. We have a country run in secret down to our police departments. A country that does not know, CANnot know, by law, what is actually happening in their name cannot possess the knowledge to govern themselves, making democracy itself impossible, even illegal. To become informed is to break the law. To break this blockade on truth is to spend 18 months in solitary without charge while they try to get you to falsely implicate others. To try to keep your country free and murderers tried for their crimes, they will lock you up for years without charges and then give you two weeks to get ready for trial after your mind is half gone and you haven't talked to a sane human for so long you can't construct sentences, let alone argue, against the full might of a national secrecy state that likes power and ain't about to give any up to lippy men with notions of right and wrong.

This is not about oaths and laws. This is about what is right, and what is wrong. And knowing enough to understand the different.

2A) The NY Times and the London Guardian informed the US government, before publishing anything, that they were in possession of the documents. They invited the US to review what was to be published, and were given the power to edit the documents so that no soldier would be endangered by publication. The US government refused to cooperate. So, please, keep this in mind when you talk about Manning "releasing" documents. All the T's were crossed and the i's dotted.

The war was a lie. The President and Cheney declared that Iraq had attacked us. We went there and slaughtered 60K+ people outright, destroyed their electrical generator plants, water systems, gas lines, highways and outright stole their only national resource, the oil under their feet. We did it against the advice of almost every country on earth. We've led to the deaths and torture of almost two million people. We've emptied the country of its people as they fled a 120+ degree hell that now has no jobs, no air conditioning, barely food, and has a government consisting of the son of a bitch, Chalabi, who told Bush and Cheney anything they wanted to hear. He is now in charge of the oil fields and is essentially the secret service. We have installed another bunch of thieves, and you want to "bring our boys home", like they just fought Adolph. That country could not, would not, did not want to attack us. but it had lovely oil, and we stole it.

Of course the public wants to know military secrets, that doesnt make it any less against the law, and any less deserving of a military trial.

Yes it does. Laws are written around public opinion. Also, there's whistleblower protection. If you are uncovering corruption, rather than giving aid to the enemy, your actions are not criminal. That may well be the case here. The information released was not of a tactical nature. It didn't disclose troop strengths and numbers, positions, weaknesses, or anything like that. Rather, it exposed a bunch of dirty laundry. Information that shouldn't be classified.

How about the video of the airstrike that killed two journalists in Iraq? Or the information on how the DEA has vast signals intelligence capabilities that it can use in both foreign and domestic operations (which other member of the law enforcement/intelligence community can do that?)? Or the information on the US army executing civilians in Iraq?

At the very least, the citizens of the United States should be aware of what their government is doing. How can we decide who to vote for if we do not even know what our government is up to?

Reuters had a right to know what happened to their journalists; the fact that they were killed in war is not relevant. They asked politely, and the US army refused to give them the video. This is not a matter of defending the army's actions, or comparing their actions to more barbaric wars, it is a matter of whether or not people have a right to know how two journalists wound up dead.

As for the DEA, it is not just that the US government has signals intelligence capabilities -- which it has had since World War I, by the way. It is that until recently, intelligence agencies either operated within US borders (e.g. the FBI) or beyond US borders (CIA, NSA, etc.). Now we have the DEA, which can operate inside or outside of the United States, which has more sophisticated signals intelligence capabilities than the FBI, and which has been pressured by "cooperative" governments to assist in the surveillance of political opponents. This is made worse by the fact that the DEA is not charged with protecting our national security in any way, shape, or form; the DEA is supposed to enforce drug laws.

At the end of the day, people in a democracy have a right and a need to know what their government is doing. This is not about what the US government does or can do, it is about what the citizens of the US are permitted to know.

Military laws are different than civilian laws. When you sign up for the military, you agree to be subjected to the Uniform Code of Military Justice when you are on duty or deployed. It is related to US civilian laws, but not the same. So if you want to sign up to be a solider, you need to be aware you are held to a different legal standard. A simple example would be that insubordination is against the law in the military.

Then there's the matter of revealing classified data. Military or not when you are given a security clearance, you agree to not reveal classified information. I don't mean they say "You agree to this," I mean you actually sign an agreement, an NDA. It is very much a full disclosure kind of situation in that you understand and agree not to reveal the things you'll be shown.

So you can certainly say he did the morally right thing leaking the information, if you believe that (though I would then ask you to show what information leaked you believe was so important for the public to know) but you can't argue it was legal or that he didn't know it was illegal. Since it was done in military service, that also makes it a military trial.

"CAIRO -- Al Jazeera, the pan-Arab news network financed by Qatar, named a member of the Qatari royal family on Tuesday to replace its top news director after disclosures from the group WikiLeaks indicating that the news director had modified the network's coverage of the Iraq war in response to pressure from the United States...

In at least one instance, involving a report on the network's Web site, Mr. Khanfar said in the cable that he had changed coverage at the American official's request. He said he had removed two images depicting wounded children in a hospital and a woman with a badly wounded face."

The fact that American officials are censoring the media, including Al Jazeera, may not be news to you, but it does further explain why the Iraq War looked nothing like Vietnam as far as news coverage was concerned. It wasn't because it was a good war. It was because reporting was limited to what American officials wanted Americans to see.

What makes 1863 such a good time for comparison? Social norms evolve
over time.
In 1863, women didn't have the right to vote,
and one hundred years later blacks still didn't have equal civil
rights.
What might have gotten a death penalty or even a simple
shot in the back yard without trial response in those days is no
longer acceptable today.
Should Manning be crucified today, because it was good enough for Jesus back in Roman times?

as far as I know, he hasn't been convicted which means the year and a half of torture and psychological abuse should be enough to throw the case out. Not to mention your president on public camera claiming you're guilty when you haven't even gone to trial... the US gov't should release him to show it still trusts and respects its people, but obviously it does not, and it is our enemy of free speech.

In 1863, he would have been instructed to kill runaway negroes and peaceful Indian villages. The past is not a moral high ground. If he had refused either one of those orders he would have been whipped and/or executed.

His primary oath was to the Constitution of the United States of America, not to his superiors. If your superiors refuse to act on evidence of murder, and the chain of command knows damned well there was a murder, than what can you do? You can: 1) shut up, as three million others with the same clearance did, or 2) obey your oath to the people and the Constitution and expose the murderers and their abettor who are hiding behind the cloak of secrecy which was not intended for hiding criminals. Your choice.

So who, exactly, are going to bring those who committed murder while representing us, and those who hid it, even with clear evidence, to their hangings?

If he could have attached each one of those documents to a specific crime, he might have had some moral ground to stand on. But instead he released as many classified documents as he could get his hands on.

In spite of his self-righteous grandstanding, I think he was really just pissed that he was demoted and going to get kicked out for assaulting an officer and thought, and probably still thinks, that he'll get away with it in the long run.

That cable was released by WikiLeaks in May, 2011, and, as McClatchy put it at the time, "provides evidence that U.S. troops executed at least 10 Iraqi civilians, including a woman in her 70s and a 5-month-old infant, then called in an airstrike to destroy the evidence, during a controversial 2006 incident in the central Iraqi town of Ishaqi." The U.S. then lied and claimed the civilians were killed by the airstrike.

I wonder if the treatment he received in prison will play into the trial at all? I agree he should of course be punished, as the law is the law, but let's not forget these leaks were a catalyst for the Tunisian uprising, which lead to the revolts in Egypt and Libya, which is leading to the ongoing riots in Syria, etc. Some would argue the Arab Spring was furthermore a catalyst for OWS and the earlier protests in Wisconsin.

Of course, by the looks of it, he leaked everything he could get his hands on and so had no particular motive in mind except to undermine the classification system, but wittingly or not, the man's a hero. I wish him the best of luck.

You're the only person so far who mentioned Collateral Murder. Someone else mentioned the summary execution of Iraqi women and children by US troops who then called in an airstrike to destroy the evidence. Another pointed out that we were pimping young boys to Afghani police recruits (it's called "bacha bazi", literally "boy play")

I'm actually curious about this. Normally, the defendant can assert their right to a speedy trial, and at that point the prosecution has to take the case to court within a short window (like a month or something). Has it taken this long because Mr. Manning has been getting his own ducks in a row before the trial? Or does the military not guarantee the right to a speedy trial? If it's the latter, what's to stop them from just locking someone up and throwing away the key by never actually going to court? The military justice code can't possibly be that fucked up.... can it?

He was held as a prisoner of war / enemy combatant. He was not afforded the rights dictated by the constitution. The UCMJ treats him as a POW and revokes those rights that would otherwise apply to normal military personnel.

He was not afforded the rights dictated by the constitution. He was not afforded the rights dictated by the constitution

Those rights are human rights which are protected by the Constitution, not granted by it. US jurisprudence does not recognize the right of a person to contract away human rights (e.g. you can't sell yourself into slavery).

The UCMJ is subordinate to the Constitution, so Manning's constitutional rights still exist. It seems they've been infringed.

Everything can be waived upon request. However, this is the period where the government conducts its investigation. A big, complex case would mean a long investigation.

Here the soldier is at an advantage over a civilian, because he actually gets to be involved in the hearing and present and cross examine witnesses. A civilian prosecutor can (and often does) hold a grand jury without the interests of the defense being presented, thus the saying about indicting a ham sandwich.

This is one reason why courts martial have a high conviction rate. Most cases that wouldn't result in a conviction don't get referred for trial after an Article 32 hearing. This is how our civilian grand jury system is supposed to work.

cause being held without due process for 18 months under conditions that are considered torture by international observers is full of awesome in this country.

You're right, you just didn't quite make the point strongly enough.

One interesting question is whether the treatment of Bradley Manning is better or worse than the treatment of Yaser Hamdi [wikipedia.org], a US citizen imprisoned for 3 years and then (once the US Supreme Court said that was not OK) deported to Saudi Arabia, all without having been charged with a crime, much less convicted of one.

Link please? I kept reading comments back in the original stories here on/. about all the torture, and they all seemed to revolve around the supposed sleep deprivation. Everything I read said quite clearly that he was allowed uninterrupted sleep throughout the night (between the hours of 11:00 pm and 6:00 am, or something like that).

Here's the UN report [google.com]. It should be pointed out that the UN investigator had to make this report without unmonitored access to Manning because the US government refused 'unfettered' access [guardian.co.uk], which is what the UN expects of all cooperating states.

Here's a Welsh MP [youtube.com] expressing her concern about Manning's treatment, particularly relevant because Manning is apparently a Welsh citizen in addition to being a US citizen.

In the civilian world, yes. In the military world, he could stand before a general, or a tribunal, or a jury of his peers, which is to say, a bunch of active duty military guys who have been told over and over for the last year that this guy is evil.

Having been active duty military, you are obliged to enter into any criminal proceedings, as a member (juror), with impartiality the same as in the civilian world.

People are under the impression that the UCMJ is some oddball, ignores the constitution document. It isn't. The rules make less sense to civilians,and it is harsher than the average civvy law, but it's also quite fair.

In the civilian world, yes. In the military world, he could stand before a general, or a tribunal, or a jury of his peers, which is to say, a bunch of active duty military guys who have been told over and over for the last year that this guy is evil.

-Rick

Juries under the UCMJ are almost always high raking officers and NCO's. It's not a jury of your peers. You may request enlisted, but you'll probably end up with Master SGT and above.

Note: I was on "Class-A Duty" right before my ETS, meaning I had to do all the details that required the green monkey suit. This included parade detail, charity poker night for the wives of generals, soldier of the month board (I won) and bailiff at court marshals. In the court marshal where I was a bailiff, the lowest ranking enlisted member of the jury was a SGT Major. The lowest ranking officer was a full bird colonel. Every one of those bastards stepped on my highly polished shoes on their way out of the jury box into the deliberation room as I was holding the door.

Well, if I were innocent. You don't get a group where the two sides have tried to produce the most ignorant jury possible. They're not likely to be swayed by the pretty charts and rhetoric of the prosecution if they have no real basis.

You get career military people who are generally well-educated and know the military laws themselves. The average officer on the jury is field-grade, and he'll have a military-oriented master's degree at minimum. Enlisted normally don't rise to the ranks that get put on juries without having at least a batchelor's.

And since it's a military trial, he pretty much has to prove not only that he's innocent beyond a shadow of a doubt but further prove who actually did do it. He also has to prove cold fusion using only a pack of gum, a microwave oven, and the complete MacGyver dvd box set.

I'm being facetious, of course, but US military justice isn't famous for its fairness or friendliness to the accused. Just thought people should be aware that he's pretty much screwed whether or not there's any conspiracy to get him convicted.

Having been a military paralegal, I have to say that the military actually offers many protections that civillian courts do not. Think of the article 32 hearing as a grand jury, but instead of the prosecutor running the show, the accused can actually bring evidence on his own behalf, has full representation by council, and the prosecution must give the defense all the evidence they will use. Full discovery rules apply here, not just at trial.

I shudder to think of a world where "one and a half years" qualifies as "speedy". Or have we forgotten the Bill of Rights?

In all criminal prosecutions, the accused shall enjoy the right to a speedy and public trial, by an impartial jury of the State and district wherein the crime shall have been committed, which district shall have been previously ascertained by law, and to be informed of the nature and cause of the accusation; to be confronted with the witnesses against him; to have compulsory process for obtaining witnesses in his favor, and to have the Assistance of Counsel for his defence.

I know the government isn't the swiftest thing in the world, but I don't believe it's that slow. And I'm not sure courts martial qualify as "criminal" prosecutions. But I do know that if I were PFC Manning's lawyer, I'd definitely be bringing that up.

Court martial is very much a criminal prosecution. They got away with avoiding the 6th amendment by not filing charges against him until they felt like it. he's been kept as a prisoner of war for 1.5 years so that they could circumvent the rest of the constitution and federal laws.

I've seen you claim this POW thing elsewhere in comments. Got any evidence to support this?

Because the UCMJ Article 10 also promises a speedy trial. In fact, the courts have found that Article 10's Speedy Trial is more exacting than the Sixth Amendment.

United States v. Thompson, 68 M.J. 308 (when a servicemember is placed in pretrial confinement, Article 10, UCMJ, provides that immediate steps shall be taken to inform the accused of the charges and to either bring the accused to trial or dismiss the charges; Article 10 creates a more exacting speedy trial demand than does the Sixth Amendment).

Your assuming he tried to assert that right and was denied. The defendant doesn't have to assert that right if they don't want to. For all we know the defense has been getting their ducks in a row and have been using the extra time.

The defense generally wants as long as they can before trial for all kinds of reasons. As such you almost never see a speedy trial motion. The only time you'd be likely to see one is if an attorney was convinced his client was innocent and the state was dragging their feat. However that is fairly rare.

Generally in a case where the defense would file a speedy trial motion the prosecution will drop the case rather than go to court and lose. I'm not saying it is always that way, but 99.999% of the time.

In Manning's case his guilt seems to be pretty clear cut. Thus his lawyer is not going to be at all interested in pushing the trial quickly. He'll want as much time to pass as possible for a lot of reasons.

No, it doesn't matter where the crime is committed, you are first and foremost covered by the UCMJ then any applicable civil laws. Usually, the military will defer prosecution until local/state/federal trials have run their course, THEN they will try you under the UCMJ.

He's had days in court. Administrative matters relating to his basic rights rather than addressing of the larger issues of whether he should or shouldn't be there, but court nonetheless. He hasn't been denied counsel and a judge been in charge of his incarceration and care since shortly after his arrest. The spooks didn't disappear him. He's getting due process (unless maybe someone in the process screws up and he's getting technicalities his lawyer can exploit, but those are details, not a basic denial of any rights beyond his own signing away of anything but military justice).

I was watching an episode of Locked Up Abroad and laughing at some 3rd world country that took about a year to put the antagonist to trial while he sat in jail. So, in what version of Gestapo America is 1 1/2 years OK?

What makes this case so interesting is that he clearly broke the military rules and also clearly helped humanity through his actions and he never gained anything by doing it. He wasn't paid for doing it and he knew people would hate him and that he would be punished hard but he followed his ideals rather than doing what gains him the most personally. He believed in the right of the public to know what their country is actually doing and where their tax money goes.

I see that some of you are angry with him and want him punished but when asked what he actually did wrong you can't argue further than him "breaking the rules" and "acting irresponsible". That he caused or will cause deaths is pure speculation. Maybe you are angry with him because deep inside you know you would never have the balls to pull this off by yourself? Because you know that you are that kind of person that curls into a ball when the authority beats you with a stick and tells you what to do and think. Because being told what to do and think follows naturally when you argue that the government has the right to censor and keep information secret from the public it serves.

What makes this case so interesting is the reactions from people. It tells you a lot of what kind of person you are deep inside.

Some people would say that much of the information he released shouldn't have been classified in the first place. So, who is really the one misusing it?

And what "some people say" doesn't mean squat, because you don't get to decide that when you enlist. Just like you don't get to decide what uniform to wear or what targets to bomb or who to shoot at.The military is not a democracy.

A peace prize is in order if indeed Manning is the leaker. Without the released cables, Obama would have been able to convince Iraq that our troops should have stayed longer. Because of the leaks, Obama failed in his warmongering:

That cable was released by WikiLeaks in May, 2011, and, as McClatchy put it at the time, âoeprovides evidence that U.S. troops executed at least 10 Iraqi civilians, including a woman in her 70s and a 5-month-old infant, then called in an airstrike to destroy the evidence, during a controversial 2006 incident in the central Iraqi town of Ishaqi.â The U.S. then lied and claimed the civilians were killed by the airstrike. Although this incident had been previously documented by the U.N. special rapporteur on extrajudicial, summary or arbitrary executions, the high-profile release of the cable by WikiLeaks generated substantial attention (and disgust) in Iraq, which made it politically unpalatable for the Iraqi government to grant the legal immunity the Obama adminstration was seeking. Indeed, it was widely reported at the time the cable was released that it made it much more difficult for Iraq to allow U.S. troops to remain beyond the deadline under any conditions.

In other words, whoever leaked that cable cast light on a heinous American war crime and, by doing so, likely played some significant role in thwarting an agreement between the Obama and Maliki governments to keep U.S. troops in Iraq and thus helped end this stage of the Iraq war

That sounds an awful lot like the argument used by the government during the pentagon papers trial (New York Times Co. vs. United States). How about showing us the innocent civilians, human rights activists, informants, etc. who have been killed as a result of the leaks?

Meanwhile, Reuters has the video that shows its journalists being killed by a US helicopter strike. The people of the United States have been given a glance at their government's activities, which includes information on the enormous intelligence power that the DEA has amassed. In the middle east, the documents were a catalyst for revolutions that ousted tyrants from power.

Manning broke the law, and it is hard to feel sympathy for someone who knew the danger and chose to leak the documents and videos anyway. However, the leak has been a boon for democracy and a reminder that the US government keeps far too much information secret.

Enough of that bullshit. Till to date no one has been proven killed because of the cable release. The only thing they have done is cast light on war crimes and other shit the US and their allies pull off. If anything the world is a little bit better knowing that all those conspiracy theories may not be as far fetched as the government would like you to think.

Some things are secret for good reason. Very little in what Manning released had any reason to be secret. On the whole, the country is better off having this information public than not.

Except, as a private in the US military, that was not Bradley Manning's job or duty to decide. 1 person never has the right to make a decision like that, especially one that had the possibility of costing other people their lives (Notice I said possibility, not did) And there was no way he could have known what was in those thousands of documents. If he did, then he was spending all his time reading them instead of his job, in which case he is still guilty of dereliction of duty. He is already guilty of accessing documents without authorization. These 2 charges alone probably merit forfeiture of pay and rank, as well as several years imprisonment and a dishonorable discharge. And he is probably lucky that he is being tried at court martial. Besides being supplied legal counsel that is an officer (and therefore bound by oath to the law, oath as an officer, and by honor to do the best job they can) and more than likely working solely on this case, a defendant in court martial can also bring in civilian counsel and assistance. Especially in a high profile case like this, his right are probably more protected in a court martial than in a civilian court.

Except, as a private in the US military, that was not Bradley Manning's job or duty to decide.

It is not his job until his superiors, whose job it is, fail in their duty. Then it is his obligation to do so. Our executive branch has chronically deprived the citizens of the information necessary for us to make informed decisions about how we wish our military to be employed. When those with standard authority are failing in their duty to keep us informed, it is only those without standard authority who can make the decision.

It is a further failure to satisfy their oaths of office that we have ceased to recognize whistleblower protection. The authoritarians have decided that the notion of citizens as sovereigns is far too inconvenient, and that we can't handle the truth.

People with clearance do not have the authority to just decide something should be declassified and released publicly regardless of their reason for doing so. It does not matter if you feel the country is better off or not, who knows, it very well may be. It is not up to you or a random PFC to make that determination.

He believed there was one specific crime, and he actually did expose evidence of it.

Problem is, that was illegal. Releasing every other document in the database was just piling on.

There's a procedure for getting criminally classified documents declassified. In fact, it might not even be necessary, since all he had to do was show certain people within the system that they existed, and the crime would be dealt with without declassifying the documents.

if for some reason he didn't like the result, his recourse was to take it another step up the chain. He's got a dozen commanders and a dozen Inspectors General (who checks-and-balances his associated commander) between him and the Commander-in-Chief, plus he can write his Congressmen (all three of them) or a number of officials in the Defense security apparatus whose sole job is to deal with illegal classification, and he's completely within his rights -- and encouraged -- to do those things, and told (probably on a poster in the classified storage area) that it is illegal for anyone to retaliate against him.

Instead he decided he knew that there were no honest men or women anywhere in that system, so he was above the law, and glory would shine on him for his actions.

I think he had help coming to that belief, and that encouragement constitutes a violation of law itself.